For T or L angled shaped composite structures it’s very important to maintain consistent composite orientation across geometric transition boundaries between the continuum shell elements. Below is an example where the boundaries between elements are inconsistent i.e. mismatched composite orientation and hence elemental result are discontinuous at the intersection region.

Fig-1

To avoid above discontinuity in composite orientation at the intersection, the element needs to be maintained at skewed without affecting the element quality, so that composite layup is maintained consistent throughout the mesh, as shown below- fig 2.

Fig-2

The above mesh can be generated in two different approaches:

1)      Partition the 3D geometry.

Partition the geometry appropriately to generate skewed element at the geometric transition region as shown below.

Fig-3

2)      Offsetting 2D mesh to create solid layers.

Generate the 3D elements by offsetting 2D mesh from Abaqus/CAE Mesh Module. The procedure to generate 3D elements by offsetting 2D mesh is listed below.

Mesh-> Edit-> Mesh (Category)-> offset (create solid layers). This procedure would generate similar mesh shown in figure 2.